Selden, NY – Suffolk County Community College will host Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor and Director of Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, as he speaks on the topic of climate change science and the political controversy associated with the reality of human-caused global warming, on Tuesday, May 8 at 7:00 p.m. in Shea Theatre in the Islip Arts Building on the Ammerman Campus in Selden.

Dr. Mann is an internationally recognized climate scientist, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and accomplished author. He will be available for a book signing at 6:00 p.m. at the same location. The event is free and open to the general public.

Dr. Mann’s famous “hockey stick” global temperature reconstruction was prominently featured in the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers and since then, the hockey stick has become an icon in what he calls the “Climate Wars.” His research clearly showed that modern day temperatures are significantly higher than at any time in the past 1000 years and subsequent research by Dr. Mann and others have extended this time frame back to 2000 years.

Dr. Mann recently published The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines by Columbia University Press. In this publication Dr. Mann says,

“In short, I attempt to use the Hockey Stick to cut through the fog of disinformation that has been generated by the campaign to deny the reality of climate change. It is my intent, in so doing, to reveal the very real threat to our future that lies behind it.”

This event is sponsored by Suffolk County Community College’s Office of Campus Activities and Student Leadership Development on the Ammerman Campus in Selden. For more information, please contact Professor Scott A. Mandia at mandias@sunysuffolk.edu or 631-451-4104.

6 Responses

“Michael Mann, a scientist-activist who is currently a researcher at Penn State University, then produced a controversial historical temperature assessment claiming the Medieval Warm Period wasn’t so warm after all. One of the problems with Mann’s temperature assessment was that it indicated today’s temperatures should be much lower than they actually are.

To get around the inconvenient flaw of his temperature assessment empirically underestimating real-world temperatures, Mann “hid the decline” in his assessment’s recent results and surreptitiously substituted actual surface temperature readings for the past few decades. As a result, Mann used cold-biased model data for prior centuries and a different set of warm-biased data during the last century to misleadingly assert today’s temperatures are much warmer than the Medieval Warm Period.”

I’m certainly not comparing the two people. I don’t personally know either one of them. But there’s too much at stake to simply dismiss it because of association. I think the question raised is, did Dr. Mann use a cold model for prior centuries and a warm model for more recent temperatures when he rendered the hockey stick graph? Thanks for taking the time to talk about this.